By Chloe Gets Poetic With Vegan in the West Village

Allen Ginsberg once lived in a flophouse up the block for $2 a night. He used to loiter on this corner of Bleecker and Macdougal Streets back when it was home to Cafe Borgia, hung with shields of armor and portraits of supposed Borgia family poisoners.

At By Chloe, a quick-serve vegan restaurant that opened in the space in July, all that remains of the poet is a cold-pressed juice named Howl. It leans Hawaiian with a shot of pineapple, and is touted for benefits to the skin.

Ginsberg’s friends Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs merit liquid memorials, too: On the Road, which includes activated charcoal, good for hangovers, and Junkie, a kale-heavy detoxifying libation, identified on the menu by a frowny face with X’s for eyes and tasting like leftover pickling brine.

Everything at By Chloe is designed to be adorable, including the old-fashioned black-and-white-striped awning, the puns on the menu (“Kale us maybe!”), and those pert little spot illustrations, like a fallen ice-cream cone pouting at its doom. The restaurant’s name doubles as logo (it’s stamped on the young coconuts in the cold case, which come with coordinating black-and-white-striped straws) and always appears with a period at the end, even in the middle of a sentence.

Still, there is something subversive beneath the cuteness. By casting veganism as effervescent pixie lifestyle rather than moral crusade, By Chloe may be stealthily recruiting more followers to the cause. Already a second outpost of the restaurant is scheduled to open in the Flatiron district early next year.

The winsome radical at the helm is Chloe Coscarelli, 28, who has been vegan for 10 years and vegetarian since grade school. She grew up in Los Angeles, the daughter of a film director and a costume designer, and majored in sociology at Berkeley.

Shortly after graduation, she won an episode of the TV baking competition “Cupcake Wars” without using eggs, milk or butter. Three cookbooks followed, then the restaurant on Bleecker Street, in partnership with Samantha Wasser of ESquared Hospitality, which runs the BLT Steak franchise.

Often the highest compliment a nonvegan will bestow on vegan food is, “You can’t even tell it’s vegan,” as if at its best the cuisine were an elaborate con. But Ms. Coscarelli’s cooking is cleanest when ingredients are allowed to be themselves, as with brussels sprouts simply roasted, shredded and littered with pomegranate seeds. Cumin and chipotle give life to a crumble of seitan in a taco salad, which doesn’t need the menu’s comparison to chorizo to be delicious.

Shiitake mushrooms are labeled as bacon, but it’s their natural subterranean, meaty essence that comes out when baked at high heat until they shrivel in on themselves, like a forest’s blackened, salty tears. They accent a kale and romaine salad whose miso-lemon-caper dressing and crush of almonds, enriched by nutritional yeast and maple syrup, winks at a Caesar without kowtowing to it.

But the same shiitakes can do nothing for clingy sweet potato and cashew cream in a wannabe mac and cheese. Likewise, a meatball sub tries too hard, the portobello-based orbs undone by overbright marinara and pesto. Portobellos and seitan suffer a similar fate under bourbon barbecue sauce, grilled pineapple and onion marmalade, which aim for tang but settle for sweet. A so-called spicy Thai salad qualifies as neither, despite the presence of sriracha.

Better to stick to the burgers, which maintain a judicious level of squish without going to pieces. They’re layered with enough extras to approach the multivalence of meat: in one, guacamole, corn salsa, crunchy tortilla strips and a mock chipotle aioli; in another, hot-pink beet ketchup and the inevitable Thousand Island-ish special sauce, nostalgically cloying.

A Thanksgiving special of seitan, stuffing, gravy, kale and cranberry sauce, toppling out of a potato bun, is almost Wonka-esque in compressing an entire meal into one messy bite.

As for the desserts, the ice cream is chewy, the frosting eerily stiff. Nevertheless, they are beloved, as evidenced by the trays borne triumphantly across the room. The crowd is young, mostly female and at times menacing. Customers quiver in lines that seethe out the door, loom over tables and snatch at seats. They fall upon their cupcakes like wolves.